By Tae Keller
Natalie's botanist mother has stopped getting out of bed, so Natalie enters an egg drop competition to win the money to fly her to a flower she's sure will fix everything.
Natalie's mom is a botanist, and right now Natalie's mom won't come out of her room. The plants in the greenhouse are dying because nobody's watering them. Natalie's dad is a psychologist, so he's supposed to understand this kind of thing, but he's just running the house and not explaining anything. Then Natalie's science teacher assigns a project, and Natalie gets an idea. There's an egg drop competition with prize money. And there's a flower called the Cobalt Blue Orchid that grows out in New Mexico where nothing should be able to grow. If she can win the money and get her mother there to see it, Natalie is sure her mother will come back to herself. So she and her friends start building a contraption to keep an egg from breaking. The whole book is written as Natalie's science journal, hypothesis and observations and all, which is how she keeps a little distance from what's actually happening.
When a parent is depressed, a lot of children land on the same plan: if I can just find the right thing, I can fix her. This book lets Natalie run that experiment all the way to its end, and it takes her seriously as a scientist the whole time, so it never once talks down to her. The science-journal format is what makes it work for a child who'd normally back away from a sad book. Hypothesis, procedure, results — it hands them a structure to hold onto, so the hard feelings arrive inside a container instead of all at once. And the answer Natalie finally gets is a true one, delivered gently: her mother's depression was never hers to solve. She has to learn to stop trying, without it meaning she's given up on her mom.